Archive

Great week with lectures on auditing and balance sheets, the launch services market and the popular space tourism industry. In the field of team project we continued with our literature review. Finally, we went to see Twilight on Friday. Although the movie was incredibly bad, I had a lot of fun; we kept trashing the movie until the very end. Quite hilarious.

This was space policy week. Representatives from USA, Japan, China, Russia, Europe and India gave lectures on the rationale behind their national space programs. Very interesting since in all of these countries, private space industry has a big roll on the money invested by government. My only but are India’s plans to build a Single Stage to Orbit. Personally, I don’t think they will manage to do it. You can’t go against physics. We also worked on TP Oceans literature review. Even though I did work on the effects of Tourism and Desalination in Earth’s Oceans, I still prefer fisheries. If you want to know more on the effects of human activities in the oceans, check this link.

Week 4 was quite varied. We visited Strasbourg’s Observatory, worked on Team Project Oceans, a lecture in Satellite Business consulting and a legal workshop I enjoyed a lot. I also met with Dr. Buckley to talk about my internship. Even though there are opportunities in several parts of the world, SES still is my number one choice. I hope this year they re-open their Associate Program. Looks like a very interesting position.

Although I had been researching for a week the impact of fisheries in the world’s oceans, I still had to spend most of my Sunday perfecting the two-page report we have to present tomorrow. Which is good since it helped me to shape the report and gave me time to hear interviews to specialists in the field. Some of the information I gathered:

– Small, family-owned fisheries account for 50+ % of the fishing of the world and employ 99% of the fishermen (Monterey Bay Aquarium report)

– Since the nice-looking fish are almost depleted, commercial fisheries are capturing uglier fish, selling them with a different name. E.g. The new Chilean sea bass was the Patagonian tooth fish , the new Anglerfish was the monkfish (interview to Professor Daniel Pauly).

– Fish consumption worldwide is growing year by year, and as the purchasing power of developing countries increases, they will want more fish:

But not everything is gloomy in the horizon. There is still hope according to these scientists, thanks to responsible fisheries and decision-makers in governments (a clear example of this is the Peruvian fishing industry).

The third week has passed by and I still feel the effects of jet lag. Although my mind is more focused, my body craves for at least 10 hours of sleep per day. Kind of hard with the amount of work we are dealing with.

This week was business week: financial analysis, cash flows, RFP (Request for Proposal) principles and a workshop on how to write a Business Plan. The idea behind all this training was to prepare us for Assignment 2-2: how to write a proposal for a fictitious International Space Agency’s Call for Proposal.

Between Thursday and Friday we wrote a 15 page document for a lunar orbiter capable of firing a set of penetrators to the moon’s poles. I learned a lot during this assignment, specially on ESA’s approach to Risk Management.

We also managed (how I don’t know) to work on Team Project Oceans. I chose fisheries, so I spent the whole weekend doing research on this topic. The social highlight of the week? A beer@Dubliner’s….to discuss TP Oceans 😛

I never thought I would say this but jet lag is killing me. I’ve changed two major time zones (Peru – Korea – France) in 15 days and I can really feel how unfocused my mind is. I hope that next week I’ll be better.

Anyway, each day is a new experience for me since I’ve never lived alone before, so maintaining an apartment has become quite a challenge. I think I will buy a robot from iRobot to clean the house. I love cooking, I hate cleaning.

Last week we started working on Assignment 2-1: How to design a spacecraft that could go to the moon and deliver a set of penetrators. These penetrators would penetrate (sorry for the redundancy) the lunar soil in pre-chosen sites and gather data for scientific research.

After a week of very hard work (after all, we also had lectures and the Team Project) we made the presentations to the faculty. I think that our group did a very good job but other teams did better (for example, SLAM).

Fortunately my thesis from my MSc. in Industrial Engineering is on the Space Launch Services industry; that helped me a lot to evaluate the rocket and upper stage required for the mission. Unfortunately I forgot to mention how we would deal with ITAR since our upper stage was manufactured by ATK and our fictitious company was not an American corporation. This issue was raised by Professor Tolyarenko during the Q&A.

Regarding the lectures some of them were repetitions from SSP09 so there wasn’t much of new stuff. However I really enjoyed the lecture on Risk Management. After the lecture we had an exercise that followed, in a very simple way, the different processes involved in Risk Management. This information would have been very handy when I was Account Delivery Manager/Project Manager at HP.